For 70 years, the thinking inside the Pentagon was that only nations with nuclear weapons could threaten America’s existence. But that assumption is now in doubt: in a world in which almost everything is interconnected – phones, cars, electrical grids, and satellites – everything can be disrupted, if not destroyed. In THE PERFECT WEAPON, Belfer Center Senior Fellow and Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy David Sanger, the New York Times national security correspondent, details how this new revolution, being conducted largely in secret, is reshaping global power.

A newly drafted United States nuclear strategy that has been sent to President Trump for approval would permit the use of nuclear weapons to respond to a wide range of devastating but non-nuclear attacks on American infrastructure, including what current and former government officials described as the most crippling kind of cyberattacks.